Score One for George In an Epic Match With a Shoe-thrower

You've heard of baseball legend Shoeless Joe Jackson. Now it's spotlight time for Shoeless Muntazer al-Zaidi.

By Jim Klobuchar

As you probably heard, the indignant Iraqi journalist who heaved his shoes at President Bush at a news conference in Baghdad has acquired a wild overnight adulation in Iraq and presumably much of the civilized world.

Gleeful Iraqi TV stations are replaying the event hour after hour. Demonstrating crowds in the streets hailed him as a national hero and demanded his immediate release from the detention cells where he was hauled by security guards. The Iraqi government, mortified by the behavior of Muntazer al-Zaidi, the now-shoeless TV reporter, has denounced his performance as an act of barbarism. The television station that employs Muntazer has demanded his immediate release.

As patriotic Americans we have to look at this episode seriously. Here was the nation’s president under assault from flying shoes in a foreign country, admittedly weapons that fell a little short of mass destruction. My problem in viewing the video last night was that it showed up on my computer screen sometime between Tarvaris Jackson of the Vikings throwing four touchdown passes in Phoenix and the Giants' Eli Manning barely escaping dismemberment by the Cowboys’ pass rusher in Dallas.

This meant that my judgment of the action in Baghdad was clouded by the usual gobbledygook from the stadium broadcast booths. While Al Michaels and John Madden were trying to figure out what happened to the Giants’ impregnable offensive line, I was distracted by replay after replay of Muntazer al-Zaidi vs. George Bush in Baghdad. It was impossible to resist the action there and I found myself subconsciously analyzing and scoring it.

You must know by now that our nation’s president smoothly ducked Muntazer’s first shoe. This should be a source of great pride among patriotic Americans. Nobody wants to see his president nicked by an incoming shoe. While it was no doubt sincerely and accurately thrown, it seemed to me wobble a little as it came in. George had it covered all the way. For his quick reaction you had to credit his baseball background as president of the Texas Rangers. That shoe flying in from the fifth row was a beanball if you ever saw one, and George ducked neatly as the shoe lost speed and heeled its way across the floor behind the dignitaries.

At the podium Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the president’s host, was duly horrified by this breach of etiquette. But as Bush gamely bobbed back into a presidential posture, Muntazer al-Zaidi wound up and flung the other shoe. I would have sworn I heard Maliki yell, “look out, George, here comes another one!”

The second shoe sailed high out of the strike zone and splattered against the far wall. In another broadcast venue it would probably have been described as wide right.

At this point the gendarmes took over and dragged Muntazer al-Zaidi out of the press conference screaming his unhappiness with our president’s liberation and reconstruction strategy in Iraq. You have to give Zaidi a few points. It has not exactly been a seamless rescue.

I've looked at that scene four or five times now. While I understand Muntazer’s ire, we have to agree as patriotic Americans that throwing shoes at our president is an insult up with which we should not put. So I reran Zaidi’s performance as an Olympic judge would have. I gave him top of the mark 6’s for style and delivery but pretty dismal 3’s and 2’s for accuracy and preparation.

It’s better than he would have scored with the Romanian judge.

Jim Klobuchar returns to an arena that will be familiar to his readers when he was a columnist for the MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE. And yes, he is the father of Sen. Amy Klobuchar.